An internet user can use a browser to interact with search engines to access documents stored on the internet. The user, for example, may input a set of search terms related to a particular search topic. A search engine that receives the search terms finds documents using a variety of techniques. One such technique is for the search engine to access metadata associated with documents and only select those documents, or the links thereof, whose metadata matches one or more of the search terms inputted by the user. The links can be ranked and displayed in the order of their relevance in reference to the search terms. The selected documents may be explored by the user by clicking on their links. New search terms may also be inputted by the user to alter or to narrow the search results. Depending on complexity of the particular search topic and how capable the user is to define relevant search terms, a search may be quite long, tedious, and oftentimes frustrating.
A disadvantage of the interaction model as described above is that logical, layered relationships between certain documents are often too difficult to be uncovered by a search engine. Thus, besides ranking and displaying the links in order of relevance, the search results are typically incapable of displaying with any indication of the logical, layered relationships between the documents. Thus, to comprehend one document in light of its interrelated documents may require the user to spend an inordinate amount of time, even when it is possible to do so.
A further disadvantage of the techniques as described above is that search terms that produce one document in a group of interrelated document may not lead to producing another document in the same group, when metadata associated with the documents fails to make such interrelationships visible to the search engine. As a result, a user is only given an incomplete picture.
Thus, a need exists for improved ways of supporting exploration of a repository of documents.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.